Wednesday, March 7, 2012

How to Protect Your Online Rep From Spammers & Scammers

I had the privilege of collaborating with friend and colleague, Karen S. Elliott. Karen and I are on a mission to to spread the word about how to protect your online reputation from pesky scammers and spammers.

About Karen S. Elliot

Karen was raised by a mother who wanted to be an English teacher and who worked for Merriam-Webster as a proofreader and an aunt who could complete the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in a day. Their favorite expression was, Look it up! Karen reads punctuation and grammar manuals for fun. Her favorite book is the dictionary.

Karen is an editor and proofreader, blogger, writer, and grandmother. You can find her at her website, The Word Sharkand her blog. Connect with Karen on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Part I - by Karen S. Elliott & Therese Pope

From Karen –

I had an old “friend” contact me via FB. I remembered as
soon as I saw her name why I stopped being friends with her. I did not want to connect
with her and told her so. She came back with an abusive email (ah, the
memories) about what a lousy friend I had been, about all the favors she’d done
for me in the past, etc. Made me wonder, “If I was such a lousy friend, why did
she want to renew contact?” I blocked her. Problem solved.

My experience –

I had a client who had a stalker on Facebook that escalated
into a harassing situation. The stalker sent my client’s editor a crazed
message about him, and claimed he was a fraud, etc. She went on a rampage and
proceeded to stalk him on other article sites and left nasty comments.
Stalker-lady then left disparaging comments and attacked me and my company on
an article site. The client and I took action immediately and contacted the
site’s editor. I received a personal phone call from the editor, and they
assured me they would not tolerate stalkers who attack their writers.
Stalker-lady was banned as a result of the action we took.

How to Protect Your
Computer

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." – Benjamin
Franklin. Wise words and he didn’t
have social networking.

We should all have spyware, web protection, virus protection,
etc. installed on our computers. If you don’t have virus software installed,
check out the following anti-virus software: McAfee, Avast, AVG, etc.

Email

At this point, all email programs have automatic spam
filters. You can also set additional parameters for blocking odd emails. Mark
incoming mail “spam” if it looks suspect or block specific email addresses.
Best bet – don’t open any email if you do not recognize the address. And for
goodness sake, don’t open attachments from anyone you don’t know!

Your social
networking

Facebook

It’s best to set up parameters when you first start your
page, however most of us just started a Facebook page and floundered through. From
Karen: “My son was going to Iraq and he wanted me to join Facebook, so I did. I
didn’t investigate anything, I just started a page.”

My experience: I originally joined Facebook because I have
siblings in the military and they were stationed all over the country and
world, and it is easier to keep in touch via Facebook updates.

As we all know, Facebook changes applications without
consulting any of us billions of users, so check your security periodically.

Maintain a modicum of privacy on your Facebook profile.
Allow little to show except basic information until you are friends with
someone. Don’t “accept friend request” without knowing who that person is, how
or why they are approaching you, or what their intent is.

How to create privacy settings for new Timeline:

Go to
Privacy Settings > How Tags Work and change the settings for "Maximum
Timeline Visibility" from "Public" to "Friends."

If you're
super-intense, you can change those settings to "Custom" and choose
"Only Me" -- then you'll be the only one who can see the posts.

Limit
your past posts -- which may have been made public at the time -- to Friends
only. To do this, go to "Limit the Audience for Past Posts" and click
"Manage Past Post Visibility," then "Limit Old Posts." This
will change all past posts to Friends-only, even if you initially made them
public.

From the Facebook Security pages: “Once you block someone,
that person can no longer be your friend on Facebook or interact with you
(except within apps and games you both use and groups you are both a member
of).”

Watch for comments @your-name-here. You can set Twitter
parameters so that everything with @your-name-here is delivered to your email (if
email is the first thing you check, this might be helpful).

If you realize a tweeter has a problem with you or the
comments escalate, consider “Report a Violation” under Help Center Guidelines
and Best Practices, Safety Center, Reporting Violations. Then block, unfollow,
protect.

Set safety parameters on your Dashboard, along the left side
list of options, go down to Settings, Discussion, and it will take you to page
that says Discussion Settings. Set parameters as you see fit.

You can also delete troll comments. Go to Dashboard,
Comments. When the comments list pops up, click the little box to the left of
the commenter’s icon. Under Bulk Actions - Unapprove, Mark as Spam, or Move to
Trash; then Apply.

Blogger (Blogspot)

After
logging into your Blogger account, go to the Settings |
Posts and comments tab. Under the Comments settings, choose accordingly. If you want
to moderate comments that people leave on your blog: under “Comment
Moderation?” click on “Always”. You will receive an “Awaiting Moderation”
message. You will then need to review and manually approve comments. If you
receive spam comments, you can report them as “spam” and pesky spammers will be
blocked from leaving comments on your blog.

According to
Blogger (run by Google):

“Here are some examples of content we will not remove
unless provided with a court order:

Stay tuned –
tomorrow Karen and I will post Part II which includes LinkedIn and Google+.
We will also share loads of websites with information on what to do and who to
contact if you think you are being targeted or stalked.

1 comment:

This was a great collaboration, Therese. Very pertinent information in this day and age. I'm fortunate I haven't really been stalked - I hope I never have to deal with that. And it feels good to get the word out about internet safety and security.